Dr. Hasan Pirkul
- Dean of the Naveen Jindal School of Management
- Caruth Chair
The Hillcrest Foundation, founded by Mrs. W. W. Caruth, Sr., created the chair in December 1988 to honor the Caruth family by supporting a distinguished professor with a national or international reputation to deliver superior educational guidance for future leaders of the state. Pirkul assumed the chair in September 1996.
“The message that investiture sends to the University community as well as the outside community is that UT Dallas not only places a high value on research accomplishments, but also that UT Dallas is here to compete with the best universities in the U.S. with substantial numbers of distinguished professorships and chairs. We have the means of attracting the very best faculty out there and retaining them.”
Since 1996, Dr. Hasan Pirkul has led the Naveen Jindal School of Management through tremendous growth to increasing stature. He oversaw the construction of the school’s $38 million facility, which was completed in 2003. Ten years later, he helped direct the building of a $25 million addition that provides 50 percent more space for the University’s largest school.
“The new addition has provided us both breathing room and vital space,” he said. “While it includes many new classrooms, labs and a spacious Career Management Center, it also gives students many areas to congregate and work together. That enhances their social as well as educational well-being, and it contributes favorably to how they view the school.”
Pirkul has transformed the School of Management. Student enrollment has soared from 2,252 in 1996 to more than 9,000 in fall 2016. The faculty is six times larger, increasing from 45 to more than 280, with more than 20 named professorships. Since 1996, the number of academic programs has risen from six degrees to more than 20. In 2011, the school was named the Naveen Jindal School of Management in honor of a gift donated by alumnus Naveen Jindal MBA’92, who is chairman of Jindal Steel and Power Ltd. in India.
Pirkul has created an academic environment that fosters scholarly inquiry, innovative teaching and research productivity. Under his leadership, the school’s academic programs are continually ranked in The Princeton Review, Bloomberg Businessweek and U.S. News & World Report.
Pirkul helped create the UT Dallas Top 100 Business School Research Rankings™, a widely used measure that he believes is his best contribution to research. The index serves as a benchmark of faculty research output in leading peer-reviewed journals and currently ranks the Jindal School fifth both in North America and globally.
“The UTD Top 100 has helped us set and reach our goal of having the Jindal School become ever more productive in research,” he said. “Improving our standing makes recruiting of faculty, students and businesses to the region much easier.”
As a teacher, Pirkul said he’s proud of advising 16 PhD students, many of whom have gone on to become successful academics. His research interests include design of telecommunication networks, distributed computer system design, knowledge-based systems, locating facilities, neural networks and genetic algorithms.
He is the founding co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Information Technology and Management. He has served as an associate editor of Management Science, Operations Research and Journal of Database Management.
He received a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering from Bogazici University in Turkey. He earned his master’s in management science and PhD in computer information systems at the Simon School, University of Rochester. Before joining UT Dallas in 1996, he taught at The Ohio State University from 1981 to 1996.